And on Wednesday, the 20th day of May, a jacket was required.
Full fingered gloves would have been nice, too, but I left them inside.
What are we doing here?
photo
19
May 20
I apologize for the rant below
Today I ran four miles. Fourth run in a week, following almost four weeks of not running. So this, I guess, is brought to you by the number four. It’s interesting how quickly you can come into and out of phase with running. And I am not, by nature, a runner.
Or a model. Or a photographer. But my hair game is on point.
Last weekend I noted that the night before I celebrated the 45 minutes where my hair was at it’s most presentable peak of long-short. Now we enter into the short-medium phase which lasts an inordinate amount of time and offers no good looks. But you’ll wish for those days when medium-medium arrives, should it come to that.
Yes, I too need a haircut. No, it isn’t really bothering me that much at all. Mileage varies, and I’m fine with that. We can all roll our eyes at one another, which is a great way to take in the grandeur of our sans-haircuts, our home-haircuts and our “I just couldn’t wait another minute to see my barber/stylist” contemporaries.
One day I realized that, despite my lights and my green screen and everything else my webcam still shoots at a pitiful 720, and that meant that slightly longer hair and formerly nice shirts with tiny spots on them were back in play again. That’ll do for now. I’m not even ironing the shirts. Oh, you see wrinkles? No, my wifi is just seizing up.
Besides, no one is looking at my hair, they’re concentrating on that typo from my last email. I dashed off a note last night related to one of today’s Zoom calls. I consulted it this morning to make sure I had the meeting topic well in hand. And that’s when I found the typo. It was one of those where there are two words that sound the same, but mean wholly different things and when you use the wrong one you look feral and uneducated. Never mind that I was still corresponding at 8:01 p.m. There was an obvious error and it will now shame me for all of my days.
I talked with a history professor who has built out a food program at the university and, this summer, they’ve collaborated on creating a meal and delivery service. There’s a lot you can’t get to in an interview like this, but if you look up Carl Ipsen‘s research interests this all make sense.
And it’s a small scale effort, relative to these big food banks staffed out by the National Guard. But the man brought two or three different units of the university together, even as it scaled down in a pandemic. And from that they created an effort that feeds 70 or so meals a day, and counting, to members of the campus community? That’s something.
People doing things, like the famed chef who’s creating that menu that Ipsen talks about, the people preparing the food, the drivers bringing things in from farms and food plants … people taking the initiative of the moment and making it productive, they’re going to be the unheralded glue of all of this. We’ll talk nurses and doctors and truck drivers and shelf stockers, and we should. There are also a lot of other people doing a lot of good, big and small. We’d all do well to acknowledge them.
That’s much more inspiring than the tiresome binary argument over Covid etiquette.
Decency is not in short supply, the mention of it just doesn’t get the lift that jerks do. This is not a new phenomenon, and we’d do well to think of that, too.
18
May 20
This is mostly about a bike ride, but also pets
Today I learned that next week is Memorial Day. Sorta sneaks up on you, doesn’t it?
We get a three-day weekend! I wonder what that will be like. Probably we’ll hang out with the cats, same as everyday. They are having a great time of it all. Phoebe has lately been enjoying the steps in the midday:
Poseidon spends a lot of the day warning off the birds, finding new ways to get into the same kinds of trouble and relying on his cuteness to make us forget about it.
We’ve recently shown them some more windows they haven’t had available to them, but they always come back to the windows that point to the southeast. They get it.
Had a lovely little bike ride today. And by lovely I mean we did hill repeats. You go up a hill, then you go down that hill, then you go up that hill, and then you go down that hill, then you go up that hill, and you realize you’ve lost count already.
So I sing a different song to myself each time. It’s somehow easier to count back the songs than recalling how many times I’ve grimaced over that especially steep spot.
Today I was singing aloud, which has the added bonus of amusing The Yankee when she was going up or down the hill opposite my journey.
(That is not the hill. That’s just part of the ride on either side of the hills. The hill was steep, tree-covered, slick from an earlier rain and featured an embankment on one side and a steep drop-off on the other. Also part of a tree fell over behind me at one point. It was an altogether different vibe than the approximately-a-suburb you have in that photo.)
She’s getting stronger on climbs, and if that continues I’m in real trouble.
So it was a lovely 22-mile ride. We rode past a colleague’s house and I yelled to him from the road, which amuses us, and him, but not his neighbors. Probably that route takes us by someone else we know, but I don’t know where everyone lives, which is a shame for so many reasons.
On my last repeat I went all the way down to the lake, where the boat launch is, and climbed the whole way out. And suddenly I realized why we were only doing the top half of the climb for the repeats. After 13 reps up an 8.6 degree ascent the bottom half of the full climb is a leg breaker, it was a 200-foot ascent over a half-mile with a maximum gradient of 12 percent, which, by then, was enough. And that’s not the point. The hills were the point. which is certainly one wake to look forward to the end of your weekend. And since there was a ride we can return to the irregular-when-I-think-of-it Barns By Bike feature. Look at this beaut!
Remember how, on Friday, we examined the malfunctioning speed on one of the cycling apps? Today it said I was doing 130.7 miles per hour on the first descent. I was not.
I save that kind of speed for the climb back out, where I set PRs on three Strava segments after riding all those hills.
15
May 20
How fast am I?
We went for a bike ride to bring in the weekend. We decided to go out 50 minutes and then turn around and come back. I went 55 minutes, because sometimes you need an extra 10 minutes. I’m looking, now, at the mile splits on the tracking app. Each number represents the maximum touched within that mile. Let’s check them out.
27.2
66.8
27.3
28.7
25.7
30.9
103.3
24.4
21.9
25.6
28.9
25.5
26.2
26.9
32.0
31.6
49.9
19.9
27.0
25.6
36.9
26.4
30.7
78.1
26.9
104.4
27.2
35.3
22.3
There are no typos there, but which do you think are wrong? Some of them are wrong. I was pounding on the pedals and stretching the chain and really working through the hills and trying to remember to breathe and, otherwise, having a good ride. Still, nothing like some of those speeds. So I assume there’s a GPS-out-in-the-country issue, or a dropped-signal issue or a this-app-isn’t-very-good issue.
Anyway, on mile 17, when I wasn’t doing 49.9 miles per hour, I cruised past this place. Couldn’t tell you the last time I saw a kokopelli.
Surely there’s something about putting two of them together that is a bad idea. It was a god of fertility, a god of agriculture. Oh, and also a trickster. If there’s a place where you don’t want a trickster god, it would be in your crops, or your abode.
Elsewhere, work stuff. There was a meeting and I wrote 1,900 words about demo reels and so on.
Most important news of the day …
I … shouldn't be this excited about a TV show … but this is something quite special. https://t.co/y2xz5asZWE
— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith) May 15, 2020
And, to the weekend!
14
May 20
This is for the birds
I do believe spring and summer showed up on the same day, making themselves unmistakably known during today’s little jog. It was a simple and persperific 5K, and the first time this year that has felt actually warm during a ride or run. Oh, I’ll sweat in almost any temperature. We are, however, now suddenly, and without any proper build-up befitting it’s importance, flirting with that time when you wonder if the concept of sweat does, in fact, cool you down like you were always told.
Which sounds like I can’t be pleased by the weather. Too cold. Too gray. Too damp. Too hot. And for the first two those your analysis is correct. For the third, no such thing. For the fourth, I just need a week or two of acclimation, that’s all. And that’s where we find ourselves today, wishing there’d been a proper subtle transition. But sometimes you aren’t allowed nice things, meteorologically speaking.
Sometimes we complain just because we can.
Hey, 77 felt fantastic. And then I elevated my heart rate a little and the sweat started stinging my eyes and that was fine, I guess. Later I got to that point where the ol’ internal thermostat decides to flip on over and there’s a signal from the engine room: all pores answering. And that’s how my run ended, doing planks, sweating a lot, laughing at the idea of a spring, missed.
It sounds like a mid-20th American novel: The Spring Season Lost.
None were concerned at the bird feeders. The blackbird least of all:
Fun tidbit about the House Finch. It was originally a western bird. Someone took them east to try to sell them in the early 1940s, but eventually set them free in disgust. (“I just knew these people were going to want them as caged birds!”) And they’ve spread to be seen across the country and southern Canada since.
That’d be an annoying caged bird, if you ask me. But rare is the bird that isn’t. And they should all be flying free, filling their role in the ecosystem, not cluttering up the house.
Now this guy isn’t judging me, at all:
It took a long while to win over this blue jay for pictures. But at least he didn’t attack me:
I got a few nice shots of him. And I think I understand his hesitancy.
He’s conscientious about his combover!
